Monday, 15 August 2016

SAINTS PRESERVE US

Advertising, Marketing and the Fomentation
of Popular Discontent

The Edmonton
Journal last week reported that Lexus drivers will have access to 30
pre-paid, preferred and branded parking stalls at Edmonton International
Airport (EIA). That leaves 1,170 spaces in the sheltered parkade for the rest
of us. The EIA has sniffed, and rightly so, that parking revenues are crucial
to its non-profit operation and that the airport boasts more than 13,500 slots
on site, and anyway, it’s up to Lexus to enforce their exclusive usage. Still,
the average traveler is inclined to mutter, ‘Grrr.’

On the same day that story was published
Ann and I tried to buy a pair of tickets for the Dixie Chicks show in the soon
to be completed downtown arena. (Disclosure: rock is dead and has crumbled into
an expensive exercise in nostalgia; we have increasingly gravitated toward
roots music which is equally authentic and at least current; and I admire the
Dixie Chicks’ politics.) We kept selecting seats we were disqualified from
purchasing because we did not possess an American Express card. I said, ‘Grrr,
fucking grrr.’

Lexus and American Express are high end
brands. We all know it’s tough out there trying to pitch a product or a
service. The marketers behind these two familiar logos are trying to provide
value added benefits to their current crop of clients while trying to lure new
ones up and onto their elevated peaks. Status is all some of us aspire to.
Perception is everything, especially when it’s a construct of persuasion, a
false want needlessly created. Have these two brands done themselves any
favours by fumbling toward elitism?

As a car owner or card holder are you
comfortable with the idea of an ethereal entity presuming to speak for you and
your beliefs? Do you enjoy being singled out as a conspicuous consumer and
subjected to the envy and anger of strangers, is that the sort of club for
which you covet a membership card? And how big is the slight to others when a
multi-national corporation effectively says: ‘We know you want that parking
space or those tickets, but sorry, you’re not good enough, you don’t belong,
you’re not eligible.’ If Lexus and American Express cause others to nurse
grudges, why, it’s easy enough for the snubbed to peer around and question
everything else that constitutes civilized society and identify other wrongs,
real or perceived.

We know that no one single cause or factor
facilitates an event or an era. The ad industry has shilled nothing but great
expectations and inflated promises since it came to the fore with the advent of
mass production and the invention of the steam powered printing press. We
cannot blame marketing and advertising solely for the rampant disenchantment
with pretty much everything that now seems endemic in western countries. Yet
the industry has played its modest role, there are those drive-by, roped off
parking spaces and lousy concert tickets here in Edmonton, and it has spread or spun the
messages of dissatisfaction trumpeted by special interest groups around the
globe. Everybody everywhere has a lot to complain about. Pick a scab, any scab,
the deck’s stacked.

Resentment is an easy bed of hot coals to
stoke. An orange populist, a demagogue somewhere, say in a country south of
Canada, might bellow that a portion of the seething populace is right to
believe they’ve been jammed by liberal elitists, Lexus drivers and American
Express card owners, excluded and forgotten, and that everything is rigged
against them, always has been, and how about those ringing endorsements from
the American Nazi Party and the Klu Klux Klan’s former Grand Wizard! ‘Make America
Great Again!’

The irony is that the Trump brand with its
ostentatious gold capital letters has always aspired to the aerie heights
occupied by established luxury brands. One of the advertising adages I still
adhere to is that a person cannot be a brand. However a personalized brand will
not only gratify the ego of the founder but reflect their traits and qualities
as well. The range of Trump lifestyle products (he doesn’t exactly manufacture Reardon
metal), hotels, casinos and golf courses, premium meat and vodka, scattershot
(real esteak?) and vulgar, were never meant to be marketed to the core
constituency that now supports him because to get the best of the best, the absolute
best, the best there is, you need a lot of money, a ton of money, a pile of
money. Come November, a segment of registered Republicans will cast their votes
for a man who, in his uniquely gauche, indeed signature way, has contributed to
their sense of alienation.